Now that the rain is (hopefully) over, there is only one way to properly celebrate the long-anticipated sunshine: a picnic. But not just any picnic -- a picnic with ribs and chicken and potato salad and lemonade and, yes, say it with us now, as much Southern food as we can carry, amen.

So we visited six restaurants in Portland and came up with a dream Southern spread large enough, filling enough, and magnificent enough to put your entire extended family into an incredibly satisfied food-induced stupor.

We'll leave it to you to work out the logistics.

The main dish

First, being red-blooded Americans, we will start with meat. Tradition dictates it must consist of four items: ribs, chicken, pork and fish.

One peek into the clean and cheery Russell Street -- bright with picnic bench banquettes; red, white and blue cloth-draped tables; and papier-mâché pigs, tin pigs, pigs from the 1950s, pigs from the 1980s and even a statuette of Miss Piggy -- and you can guess that the star of the show here will be the ribs.

The grilled baby back pork ribs (half rack $13.50, full rack $21) are basted with your choice of sauce: kind, classic, killer, derby mustard or North Carolina vinegar. Cooked for a good 10 hours, the meat is incredible: succulent, tender and eager to leave bone. The sauces are rich and flavorful until you get to killer, which abandons all pretense of flavor in favor of searing heat. We recommend the classic.

For the chicken course, our choice is the Swamp Shack, a plastic-shellfish-festooned Cajun/Creole shack that serves order after order of fried chicken ($7.50) with just one cook -- Louisiana native proprietor Trey Corkern. The exterior of the chicken is fried to an ideal golden brown. The interior chicken tenders are, indeed, tender. And while the accompanying corn is an overcooked mess of butter-drowned kernels, the side mashed potatoes, served with a crawfish gravy, is smooth enough, buttery enough and comforting enough to appease even a fussy 8-year-old with the sniffles.

It might be a more unusual dish to bring on a picnic, but, clearly, this is an usual picnic: So, sticking with our Southern theme, and needing a non-rib pork dish, we select the jambalaya ($18) from Acadia: A New Orleans Bistro.

The restaurant is an unusual combination of orange walls and purple ceiling, haphazardly hung pictures and Mason jar drinking glasses, and glossy pine furnishings and made-in-China French Laguiole knockoff knives. The jambalaya is loaded with thick slices of andouille, a house-made tasso (Cajun smoked pork butt), smoked chicken, cherry tomatoes, red peppers and scallions. It is cooked until the dark flavors of the meat intermingle with the bright flavors of the vegetables, layering the dish with flavor and texture.

Selecting a fish dish was trickier, but we chose the catfish from Miss Delta.

Located in the middle of a fun strip of Mississippi Avenue, the two things you notice instantly about Miss Delta is that it is hideously noisy even when only half full and that it's incredibly textural with its array of Victorian-inspired hanging lamps, exposed brick wall, tin ceiling-panel decorated open kitchen, and slippery vinyl banquettes complete with tears and crumbs. But forget all that, because you're there for the deep-fried catfish ($13). Miss Delta avoids the fatty, oily taste catfish sometimes suffers from. Instead, it has a succulent interior and honey-colored crust.

Unfortunately, this excellent fish comes with two overcooked sides of your choice. The rice in the beans and rice is mushy and the beans have all but lost their integrity. The overly wet mashed potatoes have been puréed into something between mush and soup. Even the pasta in the mac and cheese was downright limp. However, all is not completely lost. Even with the mushy pasta, we found ourselves compulsively picking out and devouring the tasty browned, cheesy bits that had baked to a crisp on top of the mac and cheese. So, just for those tasty morsels, we'd opt for the mac and cheese.

The starter

Now that we have the main course decisions out of the way, we can relax and think appetizers.

The amazing fried soft-shell crab ($12) from Acadia is -- despite its uncomfortable resemblance to an enormous spider -- a perfect balance of crisp fried breading and creamy sweet crab. Both a lemon wedge and a jalapeño hollandaise are included. The sauce, which borders on overpowering, is best ignored in favor of the refreshing zip of a lemon.

We know we have a rib main course, but don't miss the pork spareribs ($10.25) at Screen Door. Vastly different from the straightforward Russell Street ribs, these are glazed with a root beer reduction infused with orange, lemon, mustard, thyme and garlic, then braised, not grilled, for a beautifully balanced, meaty rib. (But skip the pickled watermelon slaw, which should be a perfect, tart complement to the ribs but is too lip-puckeringly vinegary.)

The amazing Swamp Shack crawfish pies ($3.50 each, $6.50 for two, $9 for three) are fried and stuffed with a succulent mix of crawfish, the holy trinity of New Orleans food -- bell peppers, celery and onions -- and Creole cream cheese (a buttermilk-based cheese with the tangy undertaste of crème fraiche). Sweet and crisp, they smell like a clean morning at the New Orleans Old French Market.

View full sizeThe OregonianFried chicken, corn and mashed potatos with crawfish gravy at the Swamp Shack.

No Southern meal is truly complete without a mess of side dishes. Of these, the best is the incredible, crave-worthy, thesaurus-requiring barbecue baked beans ($5) from The Country Cat Dinner House & Bar. Made with a combination of house-made bacon, smoked tomatoes and pinto beans and seasoned with ginger, garlic and Worcestershire sauce, it is reduced, then baked for a few hours, resulting in the richest, most nuanced beans we have ever eaten. And that includes the beans we ate when we lived in the South.

(The Country Cat beans, however, are notoriously rich, so if you prefer your beans sweeter and less assertive, the tasty $2.50 barbecue beans at Russell Street are cooked in a light brown sugar sauce.)

The prerequisite potato side is a toss-up between Russell Street's red bliss potato salad ($2.50), a nice balance of creamy and crunchy with its mix of vinegary mayonnaise and fresh scallions, and The Country Cat's mashed potatoes and gravy ($5), with a pork sausage and bacon cream gravy that is comfort food at its most decadent.

You need a bread of course, and the exceptionally thick, buttery, crumbly, grainy, buttermilk cornbread ($4) from Acadia will do nicely. Especially as it is served, most decadently, with honey.

We hoped to find good collard greens to add to our picnic, but every dish we tasted was dripping with far too much liquid and far too little flavor. Perhaps you could make a nice salad?

The drinks and dessert

For drinks, we are going to leave you to select your own favorite beers and wines and limit our suggestion to family-friendly iced teas and lemonades. You can get both at Miss Delta. While the sweet tea ($1.50) was more sweet than tea, leaving you with aching teeth, any Southerner would recognize it as authentic -- perfect for our Southern picnic. And the lemonade ($1.50) is a nice balance of sweet and tart, and too addictively good to miss.

As for dessert, the Russell Street fried pie duet ($5.50) is two tiny, flaky, fried hand pies -- one stuffed with bittersweet chocolate ganache and one stuffed with seasonal fruit -- good enough that you won't want to share and small enough to justify not doing so.

And, while Leah's Doughnut ($7) at The Country Cat is served with two cloyingly sweet sauces -- caramel and apple -- the doughnut itself, freshly fried and tossed in cinnamon sugar, is thick as your wrist and light as air and a prime example of a prime doughnut.

Finally, the summer addition to the Swamp Shack menu is Creole ice cream ($2). Made from Creole cream cheese, it's light and refreshing and a cool end to a hot day.